Somewhere
my loveThere will be songs to sing,Even though snow now enshrouds Our hope of spring.

Somewhere there's a hillThat blossoms in gold and green,

And there are the dreamsOf all that this world can mean.

We'll meet there someday,Somewhen As Spring unfolds for you and me.

By Maurice Jarre - Adapted by R.E. Prindle

Unchained melodies sweep over the
rainbow telling dreams that somewhere must come true. Floating lightly
as soap bubbles they pass through air castles caught in an ecstasy captured
so achingly by the artist Maxfield Parrish into his visions of gardens
of delight.

Where can these gardens of delight exist, what
parallel universe? What utopias straddle the dividing line between
this universe and that where all our dreams come true. Not in real
countries but as the fairy tales tell East of the Sun and West of the Moon.
Only in Ruritanian paradises where lives of high adventure can be lived
without fear and we always win and never lose. We recover from devastating
wounds and smashing blows to the head to walk whole again within minutes.
Where? The Zenda of Anthony Hope, the Graustark
of George Barr McCutcheon,
the Barsoom and Jasoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs as well as his Lutha of
The
Mad King.

As the youngest of these writers Burroughs
learned much about the creation of utopias and parallel universes from
both. Graustark
was in ERB's library but the
Prisoner
Of Zenda was not. Graustark made an indelible impression
on the young Burroughs that did not fade during his lifetime. Just
before the advent of the second world war in his lifetime, faced with frustrated
hopes for a better world ERB wrote his friend Bert Weston lamenting the
passing of Graustark.

ERB had over a dozen novels by MCutcheon in
his library but, by my reckoning, only two Graustarks. McCutcheon
wrote several, his locale being as important to his career as Tarzan was
to Burroughs. The two books were the first of the series published
in 1901, Graustark - The Story Of A Love Behind A Throne and The
Prince Of Graustark. The latter was published in 1914 too late
to be an influence on Burroughs' Lutha of The Mad King which was
written at the end of 1913. If he read others of the series between
1901 and 1913 we have no sure record.

In what year ERB read the original isn't known
but I suspect sometime between 1905 when he returned to Chicago and say
1910 before he began to write. Both Graustark and Zenda made quite
an impression on him but while those who believe that ERB cribbed his sources
too closely find evidence of plagiarism I can find only an inspiration
or possibly an influence.

By the time Burroughs wrote The Mad King
the Ruritanian romance had already become a genre. The very nature
of genre writing is to explore the possibliities of the genre which requires
the writer to have read at least the major texts as well as current efforts.
The author then tries to write as original a story within the limits of
the genre as possible; failing that a good derivative story will do.
Writers like Philip Jose
Farmer carry it one step further by making the characters of genre
an intellectual reality parallel with physical reality and then write about
the fictional characters as though they were historical figures.
Of course, that was a later development off genre writing.

Graustark develops the genre created by Zenda.
Just as Haggard, Burroughs and others filled Africa with lost cities the
concept of Ruritanias where everything went right in face of apparent misfortunes
began to change the face of mythical Europe. And why not? Scientific
discoveries were changing the shape of the intellect, psychological discoveries
were changing ideas of the mind. Something's gained and something's
lost. It's that lost something that people want to find again.
If it doesn't exist in reality then it can easily be made to exist in the
imagination. You see the little additional leap taken by the Farmers
of literature.

Do you imagine that in the face of major shifts
of populations into Europe and America that the HSII & III minorities
won't retreat into dreams of a golden age when their culture reigned supreme?
You're unrealistic if you believe it isn't true. It is precisely
this era from c1820 to 1920 which will be seen as the current version of
the golden age just as McCutcheon's and Burroughs' generation looked to
a somewhat earlier age when things were as they should be. In a letter
to his friend Bert Weston about 1940, looking back to their youths, Burroughs
lamented that the possibility of Graustark was a thing of the past.

In his youth Graustark was East of the Sun and West
of the Moon but in his later years Burroughs could no longer even imagine
it.

It was easy to assimilate Graustark to Maxfield
Parrishes painting of a dreamland resembling these paradises of the imagination.
From there it is equally easy to include L.
Frank Baum's Oz series as yet another such paradise. These wonderful
fancies revolve around in your mind enhanced by living colors and magnificent
sound systems where unchained melodies fill your conscious and subconscious
mind. Indeed the MGM
movieThe Wizard
Of Oz, filmed about the time Burroughs was lamenting the passing
of Graustark, may have been the tombstone of his era.

Where did it start? Very difficult to
put a precise date on this sort of thing but is it a coincidence that saving
Anthony Hope all these artists were influenced by the Great White City
of 1893's Columbian Exposition of Chicago. I have heard it said that
the Emerald City of Baum was a virtual replica of the White City. Bill
Hillman's series of articles on the expo in the ERBzine capture some,
a great deal, of the glamour but I fear Bill held himself in too much.
The Fair inspired a massive five volume eulogy by Hubert Howe Bancroft,
a major historical writer of the day, in which he described the Fair in
detail exhibit by exhibit it was so mindblowing. What dreams of perfection
did this marvel on the very edge of civilization unleash?

The
Wizard of Oz and Graustark were issued one after the other
in 1900-01. Both books, as well as the Expo, had a tremendous effect
on Edgar Rice Burroughs entering the first years of maturity.

Baum's influence is most notably seen in Burroughs'
Minidoka
-- unpublished in his lifetime.

Graustark most notably in The Mad King
but echoes of both can be detected throughout the corpus.

There is no doubt that Zenda, Graustark and
Lutha are related but the resemblance stops at the family level.
If Zenda can be said to be the original of the Ruritanian genre, Graustark
and Lutha are not mere imitations. Both later novels can be described
as inspired by but not derived from.

There is only the slightest resemblance to
Zenda in Graustark. Subtitled 'The Story Of A Love Behind A Throne'
McCutcheon tackles the theme of the superiority of American customs and
institutions over those of what both McCutcheon and Burroughs considered
decadent Europe. At the time American heiresses were actively seeking
titled Europeans to marry. Winston Churchill of England was the result
of one such union.

McCutcheon reverses roles by making a young
American man pursue a Princess of Graustark. For any seeking a golden
age of HSII & III Americanism I can heartily recommend both Graustark
and McCutcheon. Like two other Burroughs favorites, Booth
Tarkington and George
Ade, McCutcheon was from Indiana, moving to Chicago in 1901.
Just in passing it might be noted that Theodore Dreiser was also a Hoosier.

The hero of the novel, Grenfall Lorry,
immediately puts one in mind of the Arrow collar and shirt ads. Richard
Harding Davis personified, probably the ideal American male in appearance.
One can contrast that ideal with the swarthy, unshaven, sweaty, slovenly
type now being offered the public as something to aspire to.

Grenfall has an upper economic class tone,
not so plebeian as Joe, Jack or Jim. Throughout the novel he is quick
witted impetuous even reckless but because of his audacity, soon to be
styled chutzpah, always successful while his European counterparts are
vile, slow and cautious and almost certainly would fail but for Grenfall.
The answers just seem to come to him from out of the air. It is marvelous.

Slowly his ways win out in the mind of the
princess, I almost said corrupted her mind for her moral ideals were slowly
eroded as integrity becomes less important than gratifying her desires.
But then, that too is America isn't it? A deal's a deal only if you've
got the money to back it up in court in which case a contract is a contract
but then again it might not be, depends on circumstances and the 'integrity'
of the court.

Graustark itself is a fanciful place in which
brash young Americans are deferred to and dreams do come true if one only
persists. Can't give up. Plenty of castles and monasteries
hanging on cliffs, thick with donjons and the like, Parrishian bubbles
floating in the air, quite charming dream sequences, the feeling which
Maxfield Parrish captures so well. Reproductions of Parrishes work
were beginning to proliferate. Howard Pyle was an influence on Burroughs'
illustrator J. Allen St.
John as Maxfield Parrish also seemed to be.

While it is very easy to see the influence
of Graustark on Burroughs there is very little resemblance in the
two stories to each other. Burroughs retains the love behind a throne
theme in a barely recognizable form. While McCutcheon's Grefall Lorry
is of the American aristocracy of wealth living in Washington DC, Burroughs'
Barney Custer is a gritty hick from Beatrice, Nebraska, pop. 30 or so.
The Mad King was written in two parts separated by nearly a year
in real time and an eon in psychological time. The Great War began
between the writing of the two halves so that while the Lutha of the first
half more closely resembles Zenda and Graustark the second half jumps ahead
a century into a new era in time with motor cars and heavy artillery.

The first half may have been written to placate
ERB's wife Emma. By the end of 1913 she may have bitten her nails
to the quick while she berated ERB every day for his spendthrift habits.
While ERB wrote an ode to Poverty in the spirit of Edwin Hawkins' 'War,
(spit) Who Needs It?, if you remember the...ah...tune, Emma with three
children to feed had endured the period of poverty with different feelings.
Now, in 1913, with
the money pouring in ERB with breath taking confidence for the future was
spending it before he had it or even written the books to get it.
To Emma it must have seemed a replay of Idaho when ERB gambled away their
last forty dollars.

It may have been clear to ERB that he was over
the top where the money would never cease coming in, which, indeed, turned
out to be the case, but to many others including Emma he seemed to be the
same old joker who would be back on the street soon.

Emma yearned for some security, money in the
bank, which ERB was loath to provide. His is an interesting case.
No sooner did he begin to have a good year in 1913 than he packed up family
and kids and used car and headed for the sunshine of San Diego in the most
expensive first class manner. This expenditure wasn't based on savings
but in the hope of future income. '13 was an anno mirabilis for ERB
during which even traveling and vacationing he was able not only to write
but to sell a fabulous number of words. This has been told often
but it is so extraordinary, I, who have never received a penny from my
writing have difficulty letting it sink in. ERB would later boast,
while Emma undoubtedly stood by shuddering, that he literally had to wait
for checks from his writing to pay his expenses from day to day.
He obviously had an urge to live with one foot over the precipice.

You can understand why Emma was on edge.

Thus in late 1913, while they were anxiously
watching the mailbox for a check, I'm sure, ERB sat down to write the first
half of this novel which, I believe was meant to placate Emma and let her
know that the bozo she thought she married was a bozo no more. Not
totally reformed, perhaps, but reformed. When Herb Weston wrote at
the time of the divorce that no other woman would have put up with ERB's
eccentricities this must have been an example of what he was talking about.

Zenda involved lookalikes as does Mad King
so people assume that Burroughs copied Hope. Maybe, but I don't think
it's necessarily so. Burroughs with his split personality didn't
have to copy anybody, he was two different people. Burroughs didn't
even disguise that he was talking about he and Emma. He calls the
Ruritanian princess Emma. He introduces his friends Bert and Margaret
Weston as the characters Bert and Margaret of Beatrice, Nebraska where
they really lived. He even has them in the corn milling business
which they really were.

He calls himself Barney Custer. Custer after the
failed General of the Little Horn and Barney after the famous race car
driver, Barney 'Mile-A-Minute' Oldfield. B. Custer gets his rig up
to 90 per besting old 'Mile-A-Minute' by half. In 1913 that would
still be going some. Burroughs can be quite unintentionally comic.

ERB must have known he goofed back in Idaho
with the card trick but now that he had found the handle he'd become a
new man, a real man, a whole man, a made man, which augured for a bountiful
future for Emma so she could now stop treating him like a clown and revert
to her pre-card game opinion of him.

But it wasn't that easy; he'd been a goof for
too long. In the succeeding novel, Nu
Of The Neocene, when Emma had apparently rejected his offer, Barney
Custer shows up at Tarzan's ranch in Kenya but without Emma, escorting
his sister Victoria instead.

ERB would give Emma a last chance to take the
new him over the old one in Tarzan
And The Ant Men when she has a choice between the goofy Esteban
Miranda Tarzan lookalike and the real Tarzan. Emma chose Esteban
Miranda thereby sealing her fate.

The choice of the title Mad King is
significant. The blow to the head ERB received in Toronto had affected
his reasoning so that to others he appeared goofy or mad. His mental
state was accentuated by an acute feeling of failure. His father
not only told him he was a loser but apparently told everyone else too.
ERB's friend Bert Weston who knew both George T. and ERB says that he
often defended ERB to his father. George T. told Weston that
ERB was 'no good.' Weston defended ERB to George T. insisting ERB
was plenty good but that the goodness hadn't come out yet. I didn't
have a father, my mother divorced while I was an infant so I don't have
this sort of father problem, but I imagine when your father continually
tells you you're a loser it must have some effect on your attitude.

So when your father detests you, you get cracked
on the head and then you lose your wife's confidence because of your own
stupidity is it any wonder, that when you find not only success but big
success and not only money but big money, you go off your head a bit.
But then, even that looks goofy But she stuck with him; she stood
by her man.

ERB even celebrated his dead father's birthday
every year of his life which is beyond me.

Thus one aspect of The Mad King is Barney
Custer the able, confident American. Burroughs continues McCutcheon's
theme of the superiority of the American although both author's belief
in hare brained schemes seems astonishing in this day and age. The
other aspect is Leopold the cowardly, ungrateful king of Lutha. Both
writers use terms like 'king' in a contemptuous way. Kings are hereditary
while any self-made American man is a true and better king in his own right
while he can someday be President of the United States if he so chooses.
Even a hick like Barney.

Emma as 'Emma' is confronted with a choice
between these two lookalikes. She quickly prefers the self-confident
able American Barney Custer, or in other words, the new ERB, but tradition
binds her to the despicable King of Lutha. By which ERB means to
say, I imagine, that she can forget the old him and accept the successful
money making author Edgar Rice Burroughs to whom money is nothing.
Written in late 1914 Burroughs had had another astonishingly successful
year. Two in a row, get that, Emma. She didn't.

If the couple had only ERB's income from book royalties,
which were not in sight in 1913 and early 1914 to look forward to, I think
Emma's fears might have been at least partially justified. ERB didn't
ever really make that much money from his royalties. Good money but
not that good. ERB might have but Emma probably didn't see the potential
of the movies. Probably neither realized at the time the value of
the intellectual property Burroughs had created in Tarzan. Had Emma
known she might have reevaluated her husband. Probably not though.

Mad King breaks off with Barney Custer
leaving Lutha to return to Beatrice with his relationship with the Princess
unresolved. We are told that Emma read these stories before they
were submitted. If so then she could hardly have missed the import
of the failure. She either missed the message or disregarded it.

The second half of the novel was written largely
in October of 1914
nearly a year later. The world ERB and his fellows had grown up in
had now all but disappeared in the smoke of the guns of August. The
second half is dominated by the opening months of the Great War.
ERB concentrated on the southern Austrian-Serbian front siding with the
Serbs in the battleground Lutha has now become. The novel is taken
up with the intrigue of Leopold and Peter of Blentz with the Austrians
to turn the country over to them. Barney and Emma and her father
are attempting to keep Lutha on the Serbian side while maintaining Lutha's
independence. ERB gives the Serbians some much needed advice on how
to conduct the war. He must have been studying the conflict carefully.

As Barney and the King are indistinguishable
doubles, they were indeed two aspects of ERB's personality, Emma is always
in a great deal of confusion as to which double she was dealing with, always
hoping it was Barney. Indeed. The Mad King Leopold is killed
leaving Barney the last standing. At this point it would seem that
ERB is telling his Emma: See. The old me you thought was a goof is
dead; this is me and I want your love and respect.

Perhaps true but it takes more than a simple
assertion to change a woman's mind. You have to have time and patience
and wait. Emma Burroughs must not have changed hers quickly because
in the next story, Nu Of The Neocene, Barney Custer is traveling
without Emma, going to Africa with his sister Victoria instead.

One imagines that ERB's personal Zenda, Graustark
or Lutha disappeared in smoke as had the nineteenth century. His
hope and dream of entering that magic land somewhere over the rainbow in
a land of perptual Spring would have to be sought with someone other than
Emma.

In a very few years he would meet that other
hope of another and better world in Hollywoodland which should have been
a warning to him as he would learn the hard way that the answer always
lies within as difficult as that may be to recognize. The Rainbow
Trail begins and ends at your own two feet.